Sally O’Reilly at Cabinet Magazine:

I find these publications compelling by their very existence and, for the most part, unreadable. Their content slides off my mind. Gray literature’s high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else’s water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious. Each publication is an invitation to speculate on a sector’s operations, to marvel at the specificity of other people’s knowledge and the focus of their working lives. My paltry library gestures toward the infinite complicatedness of human activity and the vast, disorganized array of murky buckets out of which the materiality of our lives somehow continues to emerge.

I have recently acquired some items that confuse the already untidy category of grayness. While seeking out books on theatrical quick-change (more on that another time), I came across the Webster’s Timeline History series and, out of curiosity, bought the three cheapest of the second-hand editions available: Wallpaper, 1768–2007; Secrecy, 393 BC–2007; and Bristol, 1000–1893.

more here.

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Jamieson Webster in The Paris Review:

In her 1977 novel Angst, Hélène Cixous names the quarter hour of Great Suffering—“straight away,” “never again”—when the mother lays the child on the tiles and does not return. Angst divides us: either to remain in unending anguish, or to move to the anguish of an unendingness. This is the threshold into which the text plunges the reader.

Suddenly what we never knew is known: we are tossed out to the no place that no one ever leaves. To the unending … This is exactly what I feared, the worst. Towards which corridors were sweeping me at growing speed, and I couldn’t slow down, and I didn’t dare wake up, I was so afraid to find that what it was going to say would be forever true.

We come to a woman who has lived this angst to the final hour. There was no relief for her, having lived in and through hopelessness and no-hope, a radical expulsion and the solitude of “facing a faceless wall.” Yet from either side of this fault, one can continue loving, there where it perishes again and again—this is the hand Cixous holds out to us. In her postscript, she writes: “So there was a woman who had taken women’s suffering and their fear upon her without giving way to despair; a woman capable of confronting the Law and its pawns, without letting herself be caught by their sleights of hand, their mirror games, their ivory towers.” Because she was able to be present to herself, there may be “another writing.”

More here.

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Nicola Jones in Nature:

Crystal jellyfish have an eerie beauty: thanks to a natural protein, they emit a faint green glow. For decades, researchers have used that green fluorescent protein and similar molecules to light up the field of biology, tracking what’s happening inside cells.

Now these ubiquitous tools are getting a glow-up: their quantum properties are being harnessed to make them similar to the fundamental bits of quantum computing. “These fluorescent proteins that everybody uses as a fluorescent label can actually be turned into a qubit,” says Peter Maurer, a quantum engineer at the University of Chicago in Illinois. The idea “sounds very science fiction”, says Maurer. But the physics isn’t new, and the approach has already been shown to work in principle.

More here.

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Alain de Botton at Big Think:

In most nations and most parts of the world, for most of history, couples were formed not by the individuals themselves, but by the wider society, families, the village, the court. There were, if you like, dynastic marriages. You would get together with somebody because they had a plow and you had an ox and it seemed like a good match, or you were the Duke of Brabant and they were the Princess of Naples and that was seen as a wonderful union. So you got together for reasons that were nothing to do with emotional compatibility. There were a lot of tears, there was sadness, there was loneliness, but it didn’t seem to matter because relationships were seen to be about something else.

There was then a momentous change that occurs towards the end of the 18th century, starting in Britain, France, Germany, parts of Italy, a revolution in feeling that we now know as romanticism. One of the central tenets of romanticism is that each individual should be left to decide on their partner by their own, the movements of their own heart. They should be left to decide for themselves. It’s a beautiful idea, it’s a very liberating idea, it should make a lot of sense. We have been in the romantic age now for 200 years, perhaps shorter, perhaps a little longer time period.

And let’s put it plainly, it’s been a disaster.

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Mark Belan and Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

Infinity invites resistance. Aristotle rejected the existence of the infinite entirely; to him, infinity was simply a limit that could never be reached, not a true mathematical entity. In the early 17th century, Galileo wrote that typical ways of thinking about sets and numbers held no meaning in the realm of the infinite, and that mathematicians would only find paradoxes if they tried to apply their usual tool kit to it. And when, 200 years later, Georg Cantor formalized the idea that infinity comes in many sizes, he was met with anger and fear. His colleagues dismissed his work as that of a madman.

But in time, Cantor’s work on sets and infinity would form the bedrock of modern mathematics. As David Hilbert, another mathematical great, later wrote: “No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.”

So how can infinity have different sizes?

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Elizabeth Gibney in Nature:

Dozens of researchers from around the world are now part of a scientific group that will analyse the impacts of artificial intelligence. Observers have compared the group, called the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence and convened by the United Nations, to the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which informs governments about the latest climate-change science. For more than 35 years, it has amassed evidence showing that current global warming is caused mostly by human activity.

The AI panel’s 40 members, approved in a vote by the UN’s General Assembly on 12 February, are from 37 nations. The UN says the panel will act “as an early-warning system and evidence engine, helping distinguish between hype and reality” and produce “policy-relevant” reports.

Only the United States and Paraguay voted against their appointment.

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Ashley Fike in Vice:

Meditation has gone through a lot of phases. Cushions, apps, cold plunges, pretending a walk to Trader Joe’s counts as spiritual practice… Japan has now added a new one for the committed and the curious, coffin-lying, where people climb into a real coffin for a timed session and sit with the one topic everyone avoids until they can’t.

The naturally morbid idea is already showing up in a few places, including a Tokyo relaxation salon called Meiso Kukan Kanoke-in. The pitch is to help you slow down and examine your life. It offers “a meditation experience where you can gaze at life through being conscious of death.” If this sounds like a bizarre fad, it’s actually quite popular in Japan. Customers pick an open or closed casket, then spend about 30 minutes inside. Some versions include music or visuals. Some go for silence and stillness, which is an ambitious choice inside a box built for funerals.

More here.

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Dashun Wang in Nature:

In the early 1980s, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs described the computer as “a bicycle for our minds”. He was inspired by a Scientific American graphic he’d encountered as a boy, showing that a human on a bicycle is more energy-efficient than any animal¹. The metaphor captured the promise of personal computing: tools that enable people to go further and faster with less effort. But the deeper brilliance of bicycles lies in what they do not do: they do not mimic human biology, nor any form found in nature. The bicycle reimagined motion entirely.

By comparison, I propose that artificial-intelligence agents are aeroplanes for the mind — they can speed things up for humans even more than bicycles do, but they are harder to control and the consequences of mistakes can be huge. And scientists are particularly poised to benefit from these tools. Scientific research is, at its core, a journey into the unknown. Yet working in new terrains brings unexpected challenges² and frequent failures³.

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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

Veterans of this Cabinet will know that the states of absorption or immersion have been ongoing concerns of ours going back to our earliest issues, and even beyond, to “the Pillow of Air” column I used to contribute to The Believer magazine and the aesthetic upon which I originally founded my ill-fated single-issue Omnivore journal—which is to say those moments when our sudden stupefaction facing the world grows so profound that a pillow of air seems to lodge itself in our throats and we suddenly notice we haven’t even taken a breath in tens of seconds.

And some of you may remember two short films in particular which I linked to, I can’t remember the context, which deep-mined that specific territory of regard. The first being “Behold the Face,” the exquisite 1968 short in which the master Russian documentarian Pavel Kogan (1931-1998) trained his concealed camera upon a successions of visitors to The Hermitage Museum as they trained their own hushed gazes upon a magnificent Leonardo Madonna.

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Branko Milanovic over at his Substack:

This essay is a (modest) attempt to look at the worldwide meaning of China’s experience as the country is being poised to become this year or the next, according to the official World Bank classification, a high-income economy. This comes forty-six years after China –following several decades of isolation—joined the Word Bank as a low-income country. It thus went from the bottom to the top income classification within less than half-a-century. Moreover, it did so while bringing along more than 1 billion people (the average population of China during this forty-five years’ journey).

But I will not, in this short essay, look at these numbers They are discussed in thousands of publications, including in the first chapter of my Great Global Transformation (published by Penguin in November 2025; US edition, by Chicago University Press, coming out in two weeks). I would try to look at what it means from a different, very long-term ideological angle. In other words, what it might seem to have accomplished to people one or several centuries remote from ours. Indeed, when we look at big historical events like Visigothic invasion of Western Europe, Arab conquest of North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, the fall of Constantinople, or European colonization of Africa and Asia, we do not see only the political and economic side of such world-transforming events. We see their ideological importance too.

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Elena Korshenko in Sidecar:

When Sanae Takaichi took over as leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) last October, the party, which has dominated Japan’s postwar politics, was mired in one of its deepest crises. The LDP was riven by a major slush fund corruption scandal and facing widespread criticism of its economic policies, blamed for Japan’s decades of stagnant real wages and lacklustre growth. Sharpening this plight, the country has suffered a sustained cost-of-living crisis since 2022, as global commodity prices surged following the supply chain disruptions from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The situation was worsened by a weak yen and supply shortages at home; the price of rice nearly doubled. Successive liberal prime ministers appeared too weak to tackle these issues, and unable to fill the leadership vacuum left by Abe Shinzo’s assassination in 2022. Public disaffection led to an exodus of the LDP’s core conservative electorate to insurgent far-right challengers – the right-populist Sanseito most notably. In the 2024 Lower House and 2025 Upper House elections, the party was punished with a historic loss of majorities in both chambers.

Takaichi’s victory in the ensuing leadership contest – held under the slogan ‘#Change, LDP’ – was largely due to her reputation as a hardline conservative, which appealed to the party’s rank-and-file. It immediately prompted the exit of the centrist Komeito, the LDP’s traditional partner since 1999, from the ruling coalition, alarmed by her hawkish views and lenient stance on corruption.

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Ekaitz Cancela in The Ideas Letter:

European social democracy is undergoing its deepest existential crisis in decades. The French Socialist Party is moribund. Keir Starmer’s Labour, despite its landslide victory in 2024, would now be defeated by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. The far right governs in Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands, and stands as the leading opposition force in Germany, France, Austria, and Portugal, where the far-right Chega party has become the country’s second-largest political force, burying the legacy of António Costa, now President of the European Council. Spain remains the sole holdout where European social democracy survives—and it does so in the improbable figure of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

In a moment of accelerating systemic turbulence—compounded by the digital and green revolutions, a war economy, the crisis of the unipolar order, and the fracturing of the welfare state—national specificities are increasingly decisive in shaping political outcomes. The national consensus forged by Sanchismo is a product of this tension. His public image is thoroughly degraded at home, sustained only by the international reputation he earns as the antithesis of the far-right—a contrast his parliamentary adversaries have learned to exploit with increasing effectiveness.

The political career of Sánchez reads like a Hollywood script. From his appointment as general secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in 2014, his ascent was meteoric. He ran as the party’s candidate for prime minister in December 2015 and again in June 2016. After 609 days without an approved national budget, faced with the choice of abstaining to allow another government under Mariano Rajoy or pursuing an alternative, Sánchez refused to facilitate the investiture. He clashed with the party and resigned his seat in parliament.

A year later, in June 2017, Sánchez returned to lead the PSOE—lifted by the rank and file, reborn as a hero. “I’m not dead, I’m right here,” he declared in an interview on the country’s most popular political program, shot in a burger joint near La Moncloa, Spain’s seat of government. Sánchez presented himself to the public as the prophet of a creed with an “active” worldview—one that acts upon an atomized people to organize their collective will.

More here.

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Seamus Perry in London Review of Books:

In November 1907​ William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard, received an invitation from Oxford. It came from Manchester College – now Harris Manchester and a college of the university, but then an autonomous dissenting institution with a strong Unitarian character, recently relocated from London: its business was to cater to Nonconformist students who were still barred from Oxford. The college asked James for eight lectures that dealt with ‘the religious aspect of your Philosophy’; but, accepting the invitation a few days later, he offered as his title ‘The Present Situation in Philosophy’. When he delivered the lectures the following year they were a tremendous success: reportedly five hundred people came to the first one, so the later lectures had to be moved from Manchester library to a bigger venue, and the principal was pleased to report ‘an audience far larger, I believe, than any philosophical lectures ever given before in Oxford’. James sort of enjoyed himself, though almost no one seems to have talked to him about his lectures, and he found ‘the dinner & lunch parties with no real familiar talk ... deadly tiresome’. The highlight seems to have been seeking out the reclusive philosophical eminence F.H. Bradley, who took time to show him around Merton College.

After his Oxford stay, William went to see his brother Henry in Rye, where he was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely ‘gurgled and giggled’, he apparently came across as ‘lovable’.

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Vinay Chaudhri in Singularity Hub:

Modern AI chatbots can do amazing things, from writing research papers to composing Shakespearian sonnets about your cat. But amid the sparks of genius, there are flashes of idiocy. Time and again, the large language models, or LLMs, behind today’s generative AI tools make basic errors—from failing to solve basic high school math problems to stumbling over the rules of Connect Four.

This instability has been called “jagged intelligence” in tech circles, and it isn’t just a quirk—it’s a critical failing and part of the reason many experts believe we’re in an AI bubble. You wouldn’t hire a doctor or lawyer who, despite giving sound medical or legal advice, sometimes acts like they are clueless about how the world works. Enterprises seem to feel the same way about putting “jagged” AI in charge of supply chains, HR processes, or financial operations.

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Morning

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,

the night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows—
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.

by Billy Collins
from Sailing Alone Around the Room
Random House, 2001

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